Sweet Briar College
Media, Marketing and Communications Office
P.O. Box 1056
Sweet Briar, VA 24595
{P} 434.381.6262
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The Sweet Briar Promise outlines our distinctive approach for providing meaningful, enduring education for women. It includes:
Artifacts from Tusculum, ancestral home of the mother of Sweet Briar College founder Indiana Fletcher Williams, will be on display this fall in Benedict Gallery. The exhibit, "Everyday Life at Tusculum," will open Thursday, Aug. 20 and will run through Sunday, Nov. 15. Admission is free.
Buttons found at TusculumAn opening reception will be held from 4 to 5 p.m. on Thursday,
Sept. 10, followed by a 5 p.m. lecture by exhibit curator Lynn Rainville in
Tyson Auditorium. Rainville is director of the Tusculum Institute, a resource center
for historic preservation that makes its home at Sweet Briar.
Tusculum was originally located just up the road from the College in Amherst County. The circa-1754 Virginia farmhouse was deconstructed in 2006 to make way for a new building project and currently awaits reconstruction in an old dairy barn on campus. Once funds are raised, the plan is to rebuild Tusculum at Sweet Briar and use it as headquarters for the Institute.
The exhibit's artifacts were excavated by the William & Mary Center for Archeological Research, and include buttons, marbles, pottery sherds, and other common household items of the 18th and 19th centuries. Stone tools also were found, indicating a possible Native American presence.
The items were found scattered about the yard and "not nice and neat like a layer cake," Rainville said, referring to how many people envision archeological digs. They were likely lost or dropped by their owners and no "midden," or trash pit, was located.
A sherd of pearlwareSome of the artifacts will be exhibited in a glass case in
Benedict, while photographed copies of others will hang on the gallery's walls
alongside images of the house and the people who lived there.
Sections are planned on day-to-day life, burial grounds, architectural history, sustainability, and the people - both free and enslaved - who lived at Tusculum. A model of Tusculum also will be on display, along with maps, diagrams and old newspaper articles.
"[It's a] fragmentary record of everyday life," Rainville said.
Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and when the building is open for lectures, performances or other College-sponsored events. For more information, contact galleries director Karol Lawson at klawson@sbc.edu or 381-6248.
Click here to see photos of Tusculum before its deconstruction. Also, you can become a fan of the Tusculum Institute on Facebook.
